Food Sites for July 2017
Thursday, June 15, 2017
Bacon Butty, York, England.
We’ve recently returned from a trip to Ireland, the U.K., and France. Needless to say, we ate and drank well... and are happy to have proved to ourselves that the horror stories about the food of England are utterly false. At least they are now (we suspect that post-war gastronomy might have been a different story). We never sought fancy restaurants, but found even ordinary places were as good as better-than-average eateries in the U.S.
What with all the browsing and sloshing, we didn’t get any writing done, but did take thousands (several thousands) of photos... and walked enough so that none of those foreign calories had a chance to take hold.
We did learn that our sausage book is now available in Japanese, and Can It! has been translated into Korean. Neither of those events required any effort on our part, which is just the way we like it.
You can, if you wish, follow us on Facebook, and Twitter. Still more of our online scribbles can be found at A Quiet Little Table in the Corner.
This month’s quotes (from On the Table’s culinary quote collection cover a range of scurrilous slanderings of the English table. We include them even though they are no longer valid (but still amusing).
The English have only three sauces—a white one, a brown one and a yellow one, and none of them have any flavor whatever. Guy de Maupassant
Speaking of food, English cuisine has received a lot of unfair criticism over the years, but the truth is that it can be a very pleasant surprise to the connoisseur of severely overcooked livestock organs served in lukewarm puddles of congealed grease. England manufactures most of the world's airline food, as well as all the food you ever ate in your junior-high-school cafeteria. Dave Barry
If the English can survive their food, they can survive anything. George Bernard Shaw
Every country possesses, it seems, the sort of cuisine it deserves, which is to say the sort of cuisine it is appreciative enough to want. I used to think that the notoriously bad cooking of the English was an example to the contrary, and that the English cook the way they do because, through sheer technical deficiency, they had not been able to master the art of cooking. I have discovered to my stupefaction that the English cook that way because that is the way they like it. Waverly Root
English Cooking: You just put things in hot water and take them out again after a while. Anonymous French Chef
...the true spirit of gastronomic joylessness. Porridge fills the Englishman up, and prunes clear him out. E.M. Forster
All in all, I think the British actually hate food, otherwise they couldn’t possibly abuse it so badly. Americans, on the other hand, love food but seldom care what it tastes like. Bill Marsano
I’ll bet what motivated the British to colonize so much of the world is that they were just looking for a decent meal. Martha Harrison
Britain is the only country in the world where the food is more dangerous than the sex. Jackie Mason
More than any other in Western Europe, Britain remains a country where a traveler ... has to think twice before indulging in the ordinary food of ordinary people. Joseph Lelyveld
Gary
July, 2017
PS: If you encounter broken links, changed URLs—or know of wonderful sites we’ve missed—please drop us a line. It helps to keep this resource as useful as possible for all of us. To those who have pointed out juicy sites (like Jeri Quinzio & Andy Smith), thanks, and keep them coming!
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---- the new sites ----
(Joe Pinsker interviews Ai Hisano—a fellow at the Harvard Business School—about the history of artificially colored foods; in The Atlantic)
(Gastropod looks at Great Britain’s attempts to deal with ever-more sophisticated food fraud; podcast)
(Tanya Lewis, at Science Alert, serves before-and-after photos of some familiar grocery items)
(Sharanya Deepak, at Munchies, on the two-century-long fusion of Chinese and Indian cooking)
(Rocio Gomez, at Nursing Clio, on the social history of the Mexican staple)
(Russ Parsons interviews Ole Mouritsen, author of Mouthfeel: How Texture Makes Taste, for The Splendid Table)
(Jonathan Katz on a classic multicultural “Cape Malay” dish from South Africa)
(Chef Anthony Scanio, at NOLA Defender, on a local salad dressed in an ethnic slur)
(Sarah Bond, at Forbes, on “Race, Food and the Debate Over Cultural Appropriation”)
(Shane Mitchell, at The Bitter Southerner, on the curious historical connections between Carolina Gold and what some have called “perverted rice”)
(Helen Hollyman’s interview, at Munchies, with the executive chef of this NYC sibling of the San Franciscan fusion restaurant)
(Bonnie Tsui, in The New York Times, on the “casual racism” and inherent vagueness of this ubiquitous menu item)
---- inspirational (or otherwise useful) sites for writers/bloggers ----
---- yet more blogs ----
---- that’s all for now ----
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Occasionally, URLs we provide may link to commercial sites (that is, they’ll cost you money to take full advantage of them). We do not receive any compensation for listing them here, and provide them without any form of recommendation—other than the fact that they looked interesting to us.
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The Resource Guide for Food Writers, Update #201 is protected by copyright, and is provided at no cost, for your personal use only. It may not be copied or retransmitted unless this notice remains affixed. Any other form of republication—unless with the author‘s prior written permission—is strictly prohibited.
Copyright (c) 2017 by Gary Allen.
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